But he hasn’t given us a lot of reason to believe that. In fact, despite Trump’s protests to the contrary, he has a long history of saying and doing racist things. It's not really surprising that he's won the support and praise of the country’s white supremacists.

Here’s a running list of some of the most glaringly racist things associated with Trump. We’re sure we’ll be adding to it soon.

The Justice Department sued his company -- twice -- for not renting to black people

When Trump was serving as the president of his family's real estate company, the Trump Management Corporation, in 1973, the Justice Department sued the company for alleged racial discrimination against black people looking to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.

The lawsuit charged that the company quoted different rental terms and conditions to black rental candidates than it did with white candidates, and that the company lied to black applicants about apartments not being available. Trump called those accusations “absolutely ridiculous” and sued the Justice Department for $100 million in damages for defamation.

Without admitting wrongdoing, the Trump Management Corporation settled the original lawsuit two years later and promised not to discriminate against black people, Puerto Ricans or other minorities. Trump also agreed to send weekly vacancy lists for his 15,000 apartments to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and to allow the NYUL to present qualified applicants for vacancies in certain Trump properties.

Just three years after that, the Justice Department sued the Trump Management Corporation again for allegedly discriminating against black applicants by telling them apartments weren’t available.

He refused to condemn the white supremacists who are campaigning for him

When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he would condemn Duke and say he didn’t want a vote from him or any other white supremacists, Trump claimed that he didn’t know anything about white supremacists or about Duke himself. When Tapper pressed him twice more, Trump said he couldn’t condemn a group he hadn’t yet researched.

By Monday, Trump was saying that in fact he does disavow Duke, and that the only reason he didn't do so on CNN was because of a "lousy earpiece." Video of the exchange, however, shows Trump responding quickly to Tapper's questions with no apparent difficulty in hearing.

It’s preposterous to think that Trump doesn't know about white supremacist groups or their sometimes violent support of him. Reports of neo-Nazi groups rallying around Trump go back as far as August.

His white supremacist fan club includes the Daily Stormer, a leading neo-Nazi news site; Richard Spencer, director of the National Policy Institute, which aims to promote the “heritage, identity, and future of European people”; Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance, a Virginia-based white nationalist magazine; Michael Hill, head of the League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist secessionist group; and Brad Griffin, a member of Hill’s League of the South and author of the popular white supremacist blog Hunter Wallace.

He questions whether President Obama was born in the United States

Long before calling Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists,” Trump was a leading proponent of “birtherism,” the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is thus an illegitimate president. Trump claimed in 2011 to have sent people to Hawaii to investigate whether Obama was really born there. He insisted at the time that the researchers “cannot believe what they are finding.”

Obama ultimately got the better of Trump, releasing his long-form birth certificate and relentlessly mocking the real estate mogul about it at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that year.

But Trump continues to insinuate that the president was not born in the country.

He treats racial groups as monoliths

Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. But that's just as uncomfortable to hear, because he's still treating all the members of the group -- all the individual human beings -- as essentially the same and interchangeable. Language is telling, here: Virtually every time Trump mentions a minority group, he uses the definite article the, as in “the Hispanics,” “the Muslims” and “the blacks.”

In that sense, Trump’s defensive explanations are of a piece with his slander of minorities. Both rely on essentializing racial and ethnic groups, blurring them into simple, monolithic entities, instead of acknowledging that there's as much variety among Muslims and Latinos and black people as there is among white people.

How did Trump respond to the outrage last year that followed his characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?

"The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they're going to love Trump." Donald Trump, July 2015

How did Trump respond to critics of his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?

“I'm doing good for the Muslims,” Trump told CNN in December. “Many Muslim friends of mine are in agreement with me. They say, ‘Donald, you brought something up to the fore that is so brilliant and so fantastic.’”

Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,” disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.

“I love the Muslims. I think they're great people,” Trump said, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.

How did Trump respond to the people who called him out for funding an investigation into whether Obama was born in the United States?

"I have a great relationship with the blacks,” Trump said in April 2011. “I've always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

He trashed Native Americans, too

In 1993, when Trump wanted to open a casino in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would compete with one owned by the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, a local Native American tribe, he told the House subcommittee on Native American Affairs that "they don't look like Indians to me... They don't look like Indians to Indians."

He encouraged the mob justice that resulted in the wrongful imprisonment of the Central Park Five

In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in four New York City-area newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty in New York and the expansion of police authority in response to the infamous case of a woman who was beaten and raped while jogging in Manhattan’s Central Park.

“They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes,” Trump wrote, referring to the Central Park attackers and other violent criminals. “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.”

The public outrage over the Central Park jogger rape, at a time when the city was struggling with high crime, led to the wrongful conviction of five teenagers of color known as the Central Park Five.

The men’s convictions were overturned in 2002, after they'd already spent years in prison, when DNA evidence showed they did not commit the crime. Today, their case is considered a cautionary tale about a politicized criminal justice process.

He condoned the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester

At a November campaign rally in Alabama, Trump supporters physically attacked an African-American protester after the man began chanting “Black lives matter.” Video of the incident shows the assailants kicking the man after he has already fallen to the ground.

"Is there anyone who doesn't renegotiate deals in this room?" Trump said. "Perhaps more than any room I've spoken to."

But that wasn’t even the most offensive thing Trump told his Jewish audience. He implied that he had little chance of earning the Jewish Republican group’s support, because his fealty could not be bought with campaign donations.

"You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money," he said. "You want to control your own politician."

Ironically, Trump has many close Jewish family members. His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism in 2009 before marrying the real estate mogul Jared Kushner. Trump and Kushner raise their two children in an observant Jewish home.

It's maybe not surprising that Trump has brought so much racial animus into the 2016 election cycle, given his family history. His father, Fred Trump, was the target of folk singer Woody Guthrie's lyrics after Guthrie lived for two years in a building owned by Trump pere: "I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts."

And last fall, a news report from 1927 surfaced on the site Boing Boing, revealing that Fred Trump was arrested that year following a KKK riot in Queens. It's not clear exactly what the elder Trump was doing there or what role he may have played in the riot. Donald Trump, for his part, has categorically denied (except when he's ambiguously denied) that anything of the sort ever happened.